The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Certain operations of electronic circuit board assembly are performed away from the main production assembly lines. While various feeder machines and robotic handling systems populate electronic circuit boards with integrated circuits, the operations related to processing integrated circuits, such as programming, testing, calibration, and measurement are generally performed in separate areas on separate equipment rather than being integrated into the main production assembly lines.
Customizable devices such as Flash memories (Flash), electrically erasable programmable read-only memories (EEPROM), programmable logic devices (PLDs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and microcontrollers incorporating non-volatile memory elements, can be configured with separate programming equipment, which is often located in a separate area from the circuit board assembly lines.
The systems and sub-assemblies that are manufactured or assembled in bulk on a manufacturing line are generally functionally identical. Such products share similar problems about functionality and operation. Issues manifesting in one device are typically found in all similarly manufactured devices.